Andrei Makine - The Earth And Sky Of Jacques Dorme

Her reflection begins to slip away, then disappears. They have succeeded in cutting the train in two, and towing away the burning portion. Life can resume. A life that could so easily be mistaken for death.

Through the pounding of the wheels she hears a voice calling her: "Shura!" She returns to her Russian life, gets back to work. Day after day, together with other women, she unravels the tangle of the trains, the comings and goings of the locomotives. It all happens with the tension of raw nerves, in a melee of yelling and oaths, oblivious of tiredness, of hunger, of oneself. An engineer swears at her, her fierce response is curt and effective. A colleague helps her to lift a dead man down from the train that carries the wounded. They take hold of him, set him down on a pile of old ties. The man's eyes are open, seem animated, in them you can see the smoke rising from the fire. Two more trains squeeze her between their walls, one traveling westward (the plaintive sound of an accordion, the smiling face of a soldier cupping his hands and asking her to marry him), the other eastward, silent (at a window a head entirely swathed in bandages, a mouth trying to snatch a little air). And for her, between these two moving walls, the illusion of solitude and repose. And this thought: "Why do I cling to this hell?" She studies her right hand, her fingers injured in an air raid. Great soldier's boots on her feet. Without seeing it, she senses the dried-up and aged mask of her face.

The two trains clear at almost the same moment. A man comes walking along, stepping over the tracks, calmly swinging a little suitcase, careless of the chaotic maneuvering of the trains. He is dressed in a bizarre outfit, part military, part civilian. His unfettered gait, the glances he throws all around him, make him look like someone taking a peaceful Sunday walk who has landed by chance in this day of war. For several seconds he remains hidden behind the coils of smoke, then reappears, dodges a locomotive by a hair's breadth, and continues his stroll. "A German spy…" Alexandra says to herself, mindful of the countless posters that call for the unmasking of these enemies, who are being dropped in by parachute behind the lines in vast numbers, or so it appears. Shielding his eyes, the man observes the rapid flight of a fighter plane above the flames, then heads toward the switch box. No, too clumsy for a spy. This one is going to end up under the wheels of a handcar or of the train that now materializes, cleaving through the smoke. Alexandra starts running toward the man, signaling to him to move away, trying to make her cry heard above the grinding wheels on the track. She catches up with him, pushes him, they both stumble, lashed by the draft from the train. The words she hurls at him also hiss like lashes. Rough, coarse words that turn her voice into a man's voice. She knows the words are ugly, that she herself must be very ugly in the eyes of this errant vacationer, but she needs this revulsion, she seeks this pain, this inescapable torment. The stroller screws up his eyes, as if in an effort to understand, a smile on his lips. He replies, explaining calmly, with the incongruous politeness of another age. His speech is correct but this very correctness stands out. "He's speaking with an accent," she says to herself, and suddenly, dumbfounded, incredulous, she thinks she has guessed what the accent is.

They still have time to exchange a few words in Russian, but already the recognition is occurring, or rather a rapid series of acts of recognition: the timbre of the voice, the body language, a gesture that a Russian would make differently. They start speaking French and she now feels as if it is she who speaks with an accent. After twenty years of silence in this language.

The same hell still surrounds them, the same restless labyrinth of trains, the same grating of steel, crushing the tiniest grain of silence on the track, the same aircraft propellers shredding the sky above their heads, and this smoke that throws the shadow of unknown days across their faces.

They notice none of this. When the noise obliterates their voices they guess at words simply from the movement of lips. He gathers she is a nurse but was wounded three weeks ago and has been assigned to this signal box. She knows he mistook his direction at Stalingrad station and has so far failed to meet the squadron he has been posted to. But for the moment it is the sound of the words more than the meaning that matters, the simple possibility of recognizing them, of hearing these French words come to life. Of speaking the name of the town near Paris where she was born, that of another, his own hometown, near Roubaix, in the north. Names that resonate, like passwords.

It will feel to them as if they have not been parted all day. At three o'clock in the morning, they will still be talking, sitting in a room with no light, their tea cold in front of them. At a certain moment they will notice that the night has grown pale and daybreak has made its appearance through the shattered wall. They did, of course, go their separate ways after their brief encounter in the middle of the tracks: he to continue his search, she running toward the firemen's handcar. They had just enough time to arrange this rendezvous for very late in the evening. But from now on a different time exists for them, uninterrupted, invisible to other people, as fragile as the pallor slipping in through the hole in the wall, as the freshness of a wild cherry tree beneath the open window.

They should not have told each other the things they did; he, talking about the squadron he was to join (military secret!), she, admitting her fear (defeatism!): "If the Germans cross the Volga the war is lost…" But they spoke in French, with the feeling that they were using a coded language, designed for confidences, one that made them remote from the smoke engulfing the railroad tracks.

Particularly now, at around three in the morning, she takes stock of this remoteness. The first pallor in the sky, the scent of the wild cherry, a cool breeze blowing over from the Volga. The face of the man opposite her, the very strong tea in their cups, tea he had brought with him, whose taste she had long since forgotten. Even the moments of silence between them are different from the silence she normally hears. Yet the inferno is very close, just a few hundred ties' distance from this house. By five o'clock she will be plunging back into it. The man will go and join his unit. She listens to him talking about the last days before the war, days he spent in Paris in August 1939. He was coming out of the cinema (he had just seen Toute la Ville Danse… "Not bad… Nice music") when through an office window he saw this fair-haired woman rigged out in a gas mask, talking on the telephone. A training exercise… They laugh.

There is no order to the things they tell each other. They have too many years, too many faces, to conjure up. In the darkness it costs her less pain to tell him about the grief she carries within her, which was choking her the previous day, when they met. Seven years before she had experienced the same desolation. Her husband ("My Russian husband…" she explains) had just been arrested and shot after a trial that lasted twenty minutes. At that time she had longed for death, had thought of death with a kind of gratitude, but had also pictured another solution: to escape from the Siberian town to which they had banished her and return to France. This idea had kept her alive. She had hunted down the slightest item of news coming from Paris. One day she had come upon a collection of texts: ten French writers translated into Russian. The first one was called: "Stalin, the Man Who Shows Us the New World." Then there was a poem that bore the title: "Hymn to the GPU." Lines in celebration of the secret police who had killed her husband, among millions of others… She had read the collection to the end – unable to imagine what kind of human beings these Frenchmen could be, eyes that chose such ignoble blindness, mouths that dared utter such words.